Welcome to my world and beyond...

A collection of snippets of the books I write and, occasionally, my life and the things that inspire my writing...

Friday, April 12, 2013

A to Z "K"

K is for Kettle.

When I was little, there were two kettles in the house, a soup kettle, and the tea kettle. The soup kettle was BIG, big enough to feed 11 people. And it was used pretty often. Potato soup was the most frequently made, but chicken rice and turkey rice came in close behind. In the winter, that same big kettle was often used to make mush (cornmeal mush), and in the summer, it was the go-to kettle for cooking creamed beans and potatoes when the green beans were finally ready to pick in the garden.

The tea kettle was used to heat water for everything. We didn't have hot running water; consequently, it had to be heated on the stove. The water pipes for the gravity flow spring water were copper, and if the water had not been run for some time, the copper leached the flavor into the water--which as memory serves me, was disgusting! You didn't want to make a cup of tea in the morning without running the water for a bit.

When I was very little, I recall the wood stove in the kitchen--before we stepped up to a propane stove. The tea kettle sat on the back of it, always hot, always ready to make a cup of tea if a visitor dropped in. And there was an added bonus of the winter dry air being constantly fed steam to help moisten skin and throats.

Today, my teakettle is on the stove, always ready to heat water for tea. And I have a big soup kettle, big enough to make soup for 20 or maybe even 25 people. Stop and visit. Soup and tea :-D

I remember the tea kettle getting black from the soot because of sitting at the back side of a wood stove in my grandmother's home. I used to think that the kettle camr like that until my dad told me how it can get black like that. LOL

My kettle is always on the stove too. It has a heat retaining base coil to reduce the boiling time. I never made soup for more than 6, so I never had the need for a soup kettle. When you talked about not having hot running water, I wondered what that would be like. When we were hit by hurricane Sandy, we lost electricity for a few days. I stopped myself from whining about it though, because that was minor compared to what so many other people lost.

Hi Lynda, My teakettle is plain old stainless. I had a friend whose mother always heated a red firebrick on her gas stove, and then she'd set the hot teakettle on top of it. It kept the teakettle hot for hours!

Living that way is rough. No doubt about it. But since I was young and knew no other way of life, it wasn't terrible. Not until I got to school and discovered that I was in a minority. :-)